When we look back through history, there seems to be no shortage of martyred heroes to whom we can look for inspiration and guidance in our own lives. But only one comes to mind who was just 12 years old when he was martyred for championing a just cause.
His name is Iqbal Masih, a child slave who was brutally murdered because he spoke out against child slavery.
Iqbal was born in 1983 in Muridke, a rural village near Lahore, Pakistan. Shortly after he was born his father abandoned the family, leaving his mother, Inayat, to raise her children alone.
By the time he was 4 years old, Inayat decided she was too poor to feed all her children. Her solution was to sell Iqbal, for the equivalent of $12, into child slavery at a nearby carpet factory.
For six years, Iqbal was shackled to a carpet loom to toil 12 hours a day as "bonded labor" - called the "Peghi system" in Pakistan - by which "loan" payments are based on forced labor instead of payment with currency.
But an international group calling itself the Bonded Labor Liberation Front (BLLF) came to town. Iqbal, seeing some BLLF posters decrying forced child labor, managed to find help from a BLLF worker and escape from the factory.
The spirited 10-year-old was so physically abused and malnourished that he was as small and frail as most 6-year-olds. But he immediately began to speak out against child labor to anyone who would listen.
The BLLF listened, and soon young Iqbal was making speeches on behalf of the BLLF decrying child slavery. There are 65 million bonded child slaves in Asia, says the BLLF, and a greater number of adults.
Iqbal travelled to Sweden to a Human Rights conference and to America to speak to grade schoolers and colleges. Over the next two years, Iqbal's denunciations of child labor helped more than 3,000 children escape to freedom. He received a Humanitarian of the Year Award and a Reebok Human Rights Award. And a 4-year scholarship from Brandeis University awaited his completion of schooling in Pakistan.
But the bright future Iqbal was building, despite all the repressive forces life had arrayed against him, was not to be. On Easter Sunday, while walking down the middle of a busy street in Muridke, Iqbal Masih was shot in the back by an assassin wielding a 12-gauge shotgun.
The crime remains unsolved, but locals are convinced it was the powerful and feared "Carpet Mafia" silencing a strong, purposeful child who, they say, was making a real difference.
But Iqbal's purpose did not die with him. In 2000, Iqbal was posthumously awarded The World's Children's Prize for the Rights of the Child (WCPRC) by the organization's 21 million students at 47,000 schools in 94 countries. The WCPRC's international group of patrons include such luminaries as Queen Silvia of Sweden and Nelson Mandela. And all of them, the distinguished patrons and the 21 million school children, now know the name of 12-year-old Iqbal Masih of Pakistan; and they speak it with admiration and respect.
Here at Novus Medical Detox Center in Pasco County, FL, we feel enormous admiration and respect for our patients when they win out against the repressive forces of drug and alcohol dependence. We thought you might like to read one of their inspiring success stories.
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Fitness Trainer:
(alcohol)
"My stay at Novus was amazing from the counselors, cooks, nurses and other staff. I felt safely cared for and loved and supported in my time of crisis.
I want to acknowledge all of the nurses, Hayden, Montana, JJ, Steve and the support from the other patients at Novus.
The food was excellent!! The facility was very peaceful and relaxing.
I feel back in control of my life and my addiction. I feel healthier and more aware and connected to the world again. I also have reconnected spiritually again to my relationship with God which I believe was part of the problem of my relapse and I was using alcohol to medicate my emotional pain. Now I feel I am on the right road towards my journey of spiritual, mental and physical wholeness.
Thank you to everyone involved and working at Novus! This is a house of excellent, love, compassion and healing!" |
